(Video) Graves For Over 20,000 Tortured Cambodians, This Is 'The Killing Fields'

The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than a million people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War. The mass killings are widely regarded as part of a broad state-sponsored genocide which is the Cambodian genocide. The 20,000 mass grave sites indicate at least 1,386,734 victims of execution. Estimates of the total deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including death from disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a 1975 population of roughly 8 million. There are also around 8,00 skulls are on display in a glass shrine at the memorial building that stands in the center of the killing fields.

The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals and intellectuals. Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Thai, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Cham, Cambodian Christians, and Buddhist monks were the demographic targets of persecution. As a result, Pol Pot has been described as “a genocidal tyrant”. All the tormented souls of the men, women, and also children killed at the fields are said to haunt to this day.

Millions of Cambodians were put to work in the countryside without mercy, and agrarian socialism was taken to its extremes. Labour camps were set up. Starvation, disease, and also exhaustion were rife. Other than that, birth records were destroyed. Mass executions were commonplace. No bullets were wasted as they took place with pickaxes, bamboo, knives. That was definitely such a scary experience to go through by anyone in this world.

An orchard in the village of Choeung Ek was one of the hundreds of sites that served as mass graveyards. Prisoners from S-21 Security Prison would be transported to Choeung Ek and forced to dig their own graves. Often, people were so frail and weak with hunger that hardly any earth was removed. Shallow graves were all that could be formed and the dead were barely covered. Choeung Ek is one of many ‘Killing Fields’ in Cambodia. Human bones can be seen sticking out of the ground. A Buddhist stupa, packed with thousands of skulls, serves as a memorial to the dead.

Sources: YouTube DB Media – Broshar’s Adventures.